1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, information processing method, and program product for processing information generated by an exposure apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In manufacturing a semiconductor device, it is constantly demanded to improve the resolving power of a pattern and the overlay accuracy. In recent years, as the shortening of the exposure light wavelength is approaching a limit, a demand for a high-performance exposure apparatus is increasing.
Since the life cycles of electronic devices have shortened over time, the production mode is naturally shifting to high-variety, low-volume production for which trial production must be performed and commercial production must begin within a short period of time. To improve the productivity even in the high-variety, low-volume production, it is demanded to decrease the fraction of defective products.
To meet the above-described demands, it is necessary to know errors for their respective factors classified into apparatus, process, wafer, and shot factors, detect an abnormality at the shot level, and detect a temporal change in abnormality. These results are fed back to an apparatus, production process, and even a design pattern, thereby promising an improvement in productivity from a total point of view.
At present, however, data measured by exposure apparatuses during production cannot serve to uniformly compare and determine their performances from a difference in operating parameter or shot region array. To confirm the apparatus performance, an evaluation exposure job is executed using a common parameter and standard shot region array and various data involved are measured in this job. An inspection method of this kind must be executed after stopping the production of a semiconductor device, resulting in a waste of production time.